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Crikey, I just realized that the squishing in Naqoyqatsi makes it a sitter for my all-purpose capsule review:

"Looks like shit; too many dwarves."

Sincere apologies for not figuring this out sooner.

So, just to define our terms, here: Koyaanisqatsi is a good movie, right? We can debate about what makes it work, or what's good or bad as far as the rest of the creators' work, but we're broadly agreed that the first one is an entrancing thing in its own context?

zedz wrote:Crikey, I just realized that the squishing in Naqoyqatsi makes it a sitter for my all-purpose capsule review:

"Looks like shit; too many dwarves."

Sincere apologies for not figuring this out sooner.

As far as all purpose succinct reviews, clearly you've forgotten the commenter here years back who posted such a memorably weird and garbled take that it was for a time our board's official banner:

Jennifer L wrote:u know how old movie go with acting

I can't even tell you how many times a week I think of this line, regardless of situation

Oh Jennifer Lawrence, how far you've come

I guess that's where taste comes in, I certainly can concede that the mixing of the two forces works best (Sort of my theory of AI bringing out better qualities in Spielberg and Kubrick via their influence on each other's temperaments). But for me the Fricke films work far more than the other Qatsi titles.

Wait, are you arguing that A.I. is a standout amongst Kubrick's work, due to Spielberg's influence? That is, uh, an unusual viewpoint...

It's an asterisk in Kubrick's work - but considering that SS was operating on the principle of being faithful to SK's vision, it's a creative meeting of their two styles. The coolness inherent in Kubrick tempers Spielberg's maudlin tendencies, and his warmth and heart gives a different dimension to an inherently Kubrickian world.

I find it an essential "non canon" aspect of looking at SK critically. Maybe you can make the comparison to Never Say Never to the Official Bond canon. You have a key element of the true series (Connery) but without whatever overall creative guidance and taste Cubby brought to it.

If anything to me it's a standout in Spielberg's work for the influence Kubrick brought to it. I think you can see the residual effects of that in Minority Report.

Oh, ok- yeah, I'd broadly agree with that, it's an interesting example of a fundamentally Kubrickian work inflected by another director, in the same way that Poltergeist is interestingly Hooper-inflected Spielberg. The way you originally put it made it sound as though it was standout for both Kubrick and Señor Spielbergo, which would be claim that needed some serious defense, to say the least.

I actually find The Beard's affect on Poltergeist overstated. Beyond the general fact that a lot of his crew from the time worked on the film it seems very clearly in the mode of other Hooper films. Now I think the two are very similar directors at least in how they use the medium if not the stories they tell, but I find Spielberg's effect on the film generally overstated especially compared with something like Who Framed Roger Rabbit which by all accounts he had to babysit Zemeckis through and which is clearly a few steps removed from the rest of Zemeckis' output.

manicsounds wrote:

Roger Ryan wrote:I believe the "new" footage shot for NAQOYQATSI is presented in the 1.78:1 aspect ratio undistorted, but I'm not sure this includes much more than the opening footage of the Michigan Central Station.

That was Michigan Central Station?! I thought it was a building relic from a war....

Detroit is famous now for resembling a bombed-out war zone, but Reggio was definitely ahead of the curve by shooting this footage when he did. There is an extremely popular barbeque restaurant within walking distance of the Michigan Central Station, so there are always folks around taking pictures of the dilapidated building while they wait for a table.

I suppose it's up to my lack of knowledge of other Hooper works, but Poltergeist has always felt like a totally Spielberg film to me. I'd never considered Roger Rabbit in that context though. Zemeckis and Spielberg always had a very close relationship (He essentially got his first 2 pictures made and wasn't even able to get BTTF off the ground for him until after Zemeckis realized he had to do something without SS's stamp and made a success of Romancing the Stone). But I'd figure that Zemeckis was a "big" enough director at that point where maybe we worked with SS for advice but certainly didn't need him to step in as Hooper did (I've read somewhere Hooper was impaired by drug use on Poltergeist).

I don't doubt what you report Mr. Ryan, but I'd be interested to read more about the Roger Rabbit situation if you have any links?

I don't have any problem believing that the director of Salem's Lot and The Funhouse made Poltergeist.

Moe Dickstein wrote: ...I don't doubt what you report Mr. Ryan, but I'd be interested to read more about the Roger Rabbit situation if you have any links?

Well, I wasn't the one who suggested Spielberg held Zemeckis' hand on ROGER RABBIT (that would be "knives"), but my opinion is that RABBIT is all Zemeckis with its emphasis on motion-control camera effects, etc. POLTERGEIST closely resembles a Spielberg film because he wrote the script and had a hard time allowing another director to interfere with how he envisioned the finished product. Crew members have been saying for years that Spielberg was a constant presence on the set and called a lot of the shots.

I would assume that if anyone was a co-auteur on Who Framed Roger Rabbit? it would be Richard Williams, as the fluidity and characterization of the animation is fully as important as the live action stuff.

matrixschmatrix wrote:I would assume that if anyone was a co-auteur on Who Framed Roger Rabbit? it would be Richard Williams, as the fluidity and characterization of the animation is fully as important as the live action stuff.

A few years back I went to a screening of WFRR that Richard Williams introduced, and that's basically how he himself painted the situation.

The most haunting scene is obviously the final scene of the explosion in Koyaanisqatsi. Whoever the camera operator was (probably someone from NASA), amazingly kept that shot in focus and in frame seems almost like a miracle. Miracle for the film of course, not for the destruction of an expensive piece of mechanism.

After having watch this numerous times, I'm quite certain that most of the emotional intensity coming from this scene is also coming from the Glass music, which perfectly fills this instant with melancholy about the fate of mankind, now at this stage of destruction, going down like Icarus after trying to fly too close from the Sun.
I've been able to see the movie "live" with the Philip Glass Ensemble and there is a definite beauty in the score which has always profoundly moved me.

Reggio, how? How you can "approve" this??? Where your eyes?

I've held on to my IRE copy despite also getting the MGM DVD and the Criterion box. Definitely a film that works much better in academy for me.

If any movie deserved the On the Waterfront treatment of "Choose Your Own Adventure" aspect ratios, it was Koyaanisqatsi.

1.85:1 was the director and cinematographer intended ratio for the film. We have this from those people directly.

On the Waterfront was most likely 1.85:1, but we have that mainly from documentation rather than the creators, and since the film was produced on the cusp of the switch to widescreen some valid arguments can be made for other ratios. That is not the case at all for Koyaanisqatsi.

But why did Reggio have it transferred in academy when he oversaw the transfer for the IRE edition?

Because, as with many many other flat widescreen films being released on home video, it was a different time. In this particular case, 15 years ago. Not many widescreen TVs around back then.

EddieLarkin wrote:1.85:1 was the director and cinematographer intended ratio for the film. We have this from those people directly.

And, it probably needs to be added, the original projection ratio. The fact that this film (and countless others) was at one point presented in open matte for television screenings and pre-widescreen home video releases has no bearing on what its actual aspect ratio is.

Oedipax wrote:But why did Reggio have it transferred in academy when he oversaw the transfer for the IRE edition?

As EddieLarkin says, this was created at a time when the vast majority of Americans still had fullscreen televisions - and so it clearly made more sense to cater primarily for them, especially given that he wanted the image to be as big as possible for maximum impact. In other words, the reason for sanctioning an Academy transfer in the first place was still valid.

But in 2014, that rationale no longer makes sense, as 4:3 televisions form an infinitesimally tiny minority of the total. Which is why the Reggio-approved Criterion disc is in the original 1.85:1, and the Arrow edition will be following suit.

As it happens, I'm sure that Arrow would gladly have considered a dual-ratio edition (they have form, after all), but the only HD master available to them was framed at 1.85:1, and they didn't have the budget to create one from scratch - which in any case would be quite hard to justify given all the unambiguous evidence that 1.85:1 is the correct ratio.